In manufacturing objects, such as aircraft, a number of components may be secured to one another. For example, skin panels may be attached to frames, spars may be attached to ribs, and other components may be attached to each other to form an aircraft. Fasteners may be used to attach parts to each other. A fastener may be a hardware device that mechanically joins or affixes two or more components together.
Many existing fasteners and/or fastener collars are not marked with any manufacture information such as part number, lot number and/or manufacturer, and are often only marked with a supplier name. A particular type of fastener and/or fastener collar may also have various requirements for installing the fastener such as, for example, a required amount of torque, swage force, preload and/or other parameters. This information may be located only on the package containing the fasteners. When the package is opened, this information may be lost if not entered into a data processing system or paper record system.
Methods exist for ensuring that fasteners are correctly installed. Many of these methods rely on manually checking tables to determine proper installation requirements. Likewise, many existing methods of locating, tracking and/or monitoring fasteners rely on the use of manual tables. Although these methods are adequate, manually entering and checking tables may be time-consuming, unreliable, expensive and/or may experience other types of problems.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system, apparatus and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.